A Simple Handshake: Public Schools for Amish Students in a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, School District, 1953–1994

Public school consolidation during the 1950s and 1960s in Lancaster and Chester Counties, Pennsylvania, sparked an exodus of Amish children from the area’s public schools and the establishment of Amish schools. The politics of consolidation in one location, however, resulted in a unique arrangement whereby the Lampeter-Strasburg School District, formed in 1953 in southcentral Lancaster County, operated two one-room schools for Amish residents of the district for more than forty years. The positive relationship between Amish families and public school leaders exemplifies the possibility of comity and cooperation in contrast to the narrative of discord and conflict around Amish schooling in the mid-twentieth-century.